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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this is another example of a problem that could be easily solved if we had integrated, anonymous and frictionless payments on the web. For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly. The hurdle of course is that no one wants to put their credit card details into a bunch of random sites, or nearly any site for that matter. If we had anonymous payments integrated into our browsers, it would be very straightforward though, click a button and you give a site a dollar and you're good for a while. This would generalize and improve many other sides of the web as well, from sponsoring open source projects to creators. Removing the payment friction could help improve many things online, but I don't think I've ever seen a feasible, realistic path proposed towards that.

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> imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly.

That site wouldn’t have any spam, true. Though not because of the cost, but because it wouldn’t have any users to make it worth spamming. No one wants to pay per message. Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?” Once in a blue moon someone would post, get no reply, and be even more unlikely to post next.

And yes, yes, not literally everyone, but enough that it becomes a rounding error.

>but every comment you want to post costs one cent

So the wealthiest people get to spread the most propaganda?

You could take a page out of quadratic voting and scale costs nonlinearly. Then spamming would be disproportionately costly. This raises some interesting problems like, why not simply create multiple accounts, which have a different tradeoff calculus.

I think you have to have assets worth significantly more than one cent in order to count yourself among the wealthiest. Just my two cents.

> Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?"

I think that's well below the threshold people would care.

The problem is that $0.01 is too low, it'd be well worth spending to advertise or propagandize. For context, USA presidential elections will spend billions, they could make ten billion posts for a fraction of their war chest.

> I think that's well below the threshold people would care.

People don’t even pay 0.99$ for apps they use all day every day, opting instead to suffer through ads and have their batteries drained. There’s no chance they’d pay 0.01$ per message.

For the vast majority, there are two price points: free and not free. The psychological difference between free and 0.01$ is magnitudes larger than the difference between 0.01$ and 1$.

This is largely because of payment friction: is some scammy site going to manage its own subscription and call to make me cancel? Do I accidentally sign up to some dumb minimum term etc.

I don’t think I agree.

Something that is free is an unlimited resource. Something which costs even $0.01 is a limited resource (even if the limit is very high).

People naturally deal with limited resources different than unlimited. If it’s unlimited, each usage requires no further consideration. If it’s limited, each usage requires evaluating whether to spend dollars/credits/capacity on it.

I use a paid search engine. I paid extra for the “unlimited” option even though I should have fallen well under a lower tier. It wasn’t because of payment friction. (I was already paying a monthly fee, the only difference was the amount.) I paid the extra because as soon as this transitioned from unlimited to limited, I needed to keep a mental accounting of every usage. I needed to consider if each usage was worth buying.

If you give me a sheet of stickers for free I will struggle to stick them on anything. They are, by their nature as a physical thing, a limited resource. Payment doesn’t matter because they were free. What matters is I can run out so I need to ensure I’m making the best use of a limited resource.

It is not. This happens with the App Store, which is as low friction as you can get and is not a scammy site.

> every comment you want to post costs one cent

People were saying this about email 20+ years ago.

Not sure if it's the case here but there's a tendency for those in tech to think people problems can be solved with code.

Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve.

> Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve.

Sure, clever analogy. The internet barely facilitates many best practices for congregating on a communal basis, barring a user's self-sovereign strive to cultivate, recognize and then compensate for its failings with whatever sort of information, interactions and dealings one happens to seek.

20+ years ago, i just settled for lurking whatever boards popped out of the ether and playing EverQuest, RuneScape and Habbo Hotel, to soak in its novelty. Such persistent asymmetricity should never be lost.

I built it. [1] They didn't come.

[1] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works

Throwing pennies around isn’t a big enough appeal or a viable business, see my other comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337617

No need to charge per message. Just make every user pay an annual membership fee for entrance. This is how https://communick.com works. I have a small userbase, but zero issues with spam and abuse.

> I have a small userbase, but zero issues with spam and abuse.

You have zero issues with spam and abuse because you have a small user base, not because of the fee.

Twitter has TONS of paid accounts for spam.

First: citation needed in spammers using paid accounts. Why would they pay to spam, go through credit card fraud detection and so on when a free account is (by definition) zero cost? Mind you, I am talking about pure spam and not crazy sophisticated phishing scams. Those certainly exist in Twitter.

Second: scale. Twitter has millions of users, it is not profitable and is suing advertisers in a desperate attempt to justify its lack of revenue. Let's just say that a miracle happens and I get my dream number of paid accounts (10k at $29/year). The operation would be profitable enough to pay myself more than I ever made in any job and still contribute back to the downstream projects. I could literally close registrations on my service, or start a different vetting process.

Spam is not just unsolicited commercial messages. Remember: Stupid Pointless Annoying Message.

The worst I see on Twitter when I peek in come from checkmarks. Cryptocurrency shills are some of the worst offenders and they seem to have taken over.

> Remember: Stupid Pointless Annoying Message.

That looks to be retrofitted, not the origin of the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming#Etymology

I know. It's also one of the meanings.

All the accounts seen on the popular "ignore previous instructions" screenshots have paid for twitter. There's no reason to believe that these bots don't operate at scale and don't all spend $8 a month.

On top of that, they are effectively paying per word to post through paying for tokens. This does not stop them.

Bots being paid by a state that is a misinformation campaign is not the same as spam.

Assuming the Fediverse was as popular as Twitter/FB, they could simply run their own instances, no need to pay for access through any specific server.

> they could simply run their own instances

And then what? No one is going to navigate an instance that is just spam, and other instances will promptly block them.

Right, the incentive will be to create accounts on the popular instances, not on the paid ones.

There was a spam wave some months ago. The spammers were using Mastodon and Sharkey instances that had open registrations. They were not signing up to paid-only instances to become "legit".

Bots spamming misinformation isn't spam, gotcha. Really moving the goalposts there

I meant spam as shorthand for "bulk send of messages of similar content". Cheap to produce and to send. If bots paid by some government count as spam, then we should also say the same about sponsored content or PR releases.

Anyway, my point is that charging for access to a network where access is already open is good enough for a filter to avoid spam originating from your node. Spammers are not going to be interested in paying $29/year to be able to send posts via Mastodon when they can just create a bunch of accounts on servers with open registrations or simply running their own botnet.

I classify both sponsored content and PR-speak as spam, personally.

Should we start complaining about HN's "spam problem" because of all the "Launch HN" posts? And what about YC companies that have job ads pushed to the top of the frontpage?

Hell, I don't even have to be a complete cynic to make the argument that basically any news piece today only gets to be written if it serves the economic interests of its publisher. That is valid from the NYT and Washington Post to an indie game developer talking about their project on Mastodon.

If everything is "spam", then there is no ham. If there is no ham, there is no way to build an classifier. If there is no way to build a classifier, then what is the problem we are trying to solve in the first place?

Bots spreading misinformation are bad and a problem on Twitter/Facebook/TikTok, sure. But the reason that an entrance fee does not solve this problem is because these networks are built on the idea of controlling what content people get to see. On the "open social web", people are in charge, there is no "algorithm" and manipulation becomes a lot harder.

> Should we start complaining about HN's "spam problem" because of all the "Launch HN" posts?

No? That doesn't mean they aren't spam, though.

>For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent.

Someone built this (a 4chan clone) on ethereum, I can't remember what it's called. It was pretty dead, but the project exists.

Ethereum has (had?) the added problem of fees and latency. After ~2018, doing anything on Ethereum required you to spend like $20 and wait 40 minutes.

Was it Steemit? They had a reasonable amount of activity for awhile, some of it was good content, most of it wasn’t though.

One cent sounds low but it’s not zero, which has a special place in pricing.

Check out this paper:

https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%...

I doubt that payments of any kind will help much.

From a purely theoretical level, there's a very broad range of incomes worldwide, so any price point you use to keep spammers out makes it unaffordable to the average person in many nations, and varying pricing by nation just means the spammers pretend to be from the cheapest nation(s).

We also have a demonstration of payment-based messaging systems in that price range with SMS and voice calls, which still get junk. (Nation-specific: my German SIM gets none while my UK SIM gets a lot… but only when I actually visit the UK).

For subscription-based payment filtering, similar — while it's hard for me to determine which of Musks's statements I should take seriously or literally, twitter premium pricing it's still a test of this idea even if it wasn't the true intent behind Musk's assertion.

We used to have that for texting on mobile phones. Everyone and their dog hated it with a passion, and now "free" texting is built into the majority of phone plans in the US, even before things like fb messenger and Whatsapp. Same is true for long distance calling.

> For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwELepvBAVY

> He said "if I was in charge of Facebook, mate, I'd be saying like 'fucking QUID A GO!'"

> It gave me a small sense of hometown pride when I realized the guy was serious... small sense of hometown pride that there must be very few places in the world where Mark Zuckerberg would be offered financial advice from a guy who was 15 pence short for [his bus fare]

That only makes it easier for those with the $$$ to control the narrative.

The friction might be beaten as part of a network effect. Onboard a large internet celebrity, create a payment platform that syncs to open markets, soomething like the ronin bridge, people's funds can then be used to pay to post on said celebrities forums, expand to other web content, not just for posts but for viewing, 402 replaces ads.

The psychology is already there, "all" that's required a snowball to start adoption in the online media space.

Payments are already overwhelmingly frictionless online.

> If we had anonymous payments integrated into our browsers

Was this the initial idea of the Brave browser? Did that succeed to some extent?

"good for a while" is incompatible with "anonymous" : which means there's no account that could be linked back to you (think how 4chan is used).

Also it tends to be made illegal for obvious reasons (even if in practice, everyone but the most careful user eventually gets identified by their IP, the logs of which Web servers are legally obligated to keep in most states).

Otherwise, if you actually meant pseudonymous payments, well, Flattr actually tried to do it. Flattr 1.0 basically died in the 2012-2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, while Flattr 2.0 never managed to get enough reach, unlike the Silicon Valley backed, new competitor, Patreon.

Everything crap about the modern web is a result of commercialization, so I'm skeptical that doubling down on commercialization is going to do anything but dig this hole even deeper.

> but every comment you want to post costs one cent.

It should cost at least 10 cents. And I think your idea is the future.

A fee schedule would help, but I think what may end up happening is what happened to spamcop. The realtime black hole list at one point shutdown open SMTP relays, but how spammers got around it was Spam As A Service providers like mailchimp, sendgrid, salesforce, maropost, and others. Someone will come up with a fee based reddit spam service one can buy to flood reddit with spam drowning out real people (the 'reals' or 'non-bots').

It seems like there are things reddit could do to squelch spam that it doesn't seem to be doing, like disallowing duplicate text in posts as one example. Beyond a certain karma it seems like posting rate becomes unrestricted and I think more than one post every 10 seconds is spamming regardless.

So I think reddit right now doesn't have much incentive to squelch spam since it's not doing that much, it would take effort, and effort == money.

I think the for profit model is reddit's biggest problem right now. Others have pointed to USENET's problems, but in an open protocol those were things that could have been surmounted with effort. The for-profit problem with reddit looks to be insurmountable and the rate of enshitification will only accelerate.

Probably a clone of the old reddit is in order. Like cleddit (.com is squatted on but not .org or .net) or something like that. Or a new version of the USENET protocol. For all it's problems USENET did reveal what made scientology 'tick' behind the scenes on alt.religion.scientology. Some new version of USENET might also address DMCA abuses also.

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